Books in the Benjamins Translation Library series

''Conference Interpreting: What do we know and how?'' is the title of a round-table conference (Turku 1994) organised to assess the state of the art in conference interpreting research. The result is collected in this volume with fully coordinated reports on the round tables. The book presents an exciting coverage of the field, touching on methodology, communication, discourse, culture, neurolinguistic and cognitive aspects, quality assessment, training and developing skills.

The globalisation of communication networks has increased the domains of translation and is challenging ever more the translatorΓÇÖs role. This volume is a collection of contributions from two different conferences (Misano, 1997 and Berlin, 1998). (Multi)Media translation, especially screen translation (TV, cinema, video), has made more explicit the complexities of any communication and has led us to take a fresh look at the translatorΓÇÖs strategies and behaviours.Several papers ponder the concepts of media and multimedia, the necessity of interdisciplinarity, the polysemiotic dimension of audiovisual media. Quite a few discuss the current transformations in audiovisual media policy. A great many deal with practices, mainly in subtitling but also in interpreting for TV and surtitling: what are the quality parameters and the conditions to meet audienceΓÇÖs expectations?Finally some show the cultural and linguistic implications of screen translation. Digitalisation is changing production and broadcasting and speeding up convergence between media, telecommunications and information and communication technology.Is (multi)media translation a new field of study or an umbrella framework for scholars from various disciplines? Is it a trick to overcome the absence of prestige in Translation Studies? Or is it just a buzz word which gives rise to confusion? These questions remain open: the 26 contributions are partial answers.

This volume is about computers and translation. It is not, however, a Computer Science book, nor does it have much to say about Translation Theory. Rather it is a book for translators and other professional linguists (technical writers, bilingual secretaries, language teachers even), which aims at clarifying, explaining and exemplifying the impact that computers have had and are having on their profession. It is about Machine Translation (MT), but it is also about Computer-Aided (or -Assisted) Translation (CAT), computer-based resources for translators, the past, present and future of translation and the computer.The editor and main contributor, Harold Somers, is Professor of Language Engineering at UMIST (Manchester). With over 25 yearsΓÇÖ experience in the field both as a researcher and educator, Somers is editor of one of the fieldΓÇÖs premier journals, and has written extensively on the subject, including the fieldΓÇÖs most widely quoted textbook on MT, now out of print and somewhat out of date.The current volume aims to provide an accessible yet not overwhelmingly technical book aimed primarily at translators and other users of CAT software.

Contexts in Translating is designed to help translators understand the varieties of contexts and their importance for understanding a text and reproducing the meaning in another language. The contexts include the historical setting of writing a text, the cultural components that make a text unique, the types of audiences for which the translation is intended, and the most efficient and effective ways of producing a satisfactory representation of the source-language text. The structural levels of language are described, and the principal features of text organization are also explained. In addition, the main features of various books on translation are outlined, and a chapter on basic theories of translation is followed by a selective bibliography.